1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and a recording medium.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, there is an increasing interest in ecology. The techniques capable of preventing waste of paper before performing print of paper (before printing) have attracted attentions.
For example, if a user can check a print preview screen before printing, the user can find such an inefficient page layout that there is large blank space in a page. This can prevent waste of paper before printing. However, when print data to be printed is large, it takes time and efforts of the user to check the page layout of every page on the print preview screen. Accordingly, it has been desired to realize a technique to automatically detect inefficient page layout without requiring the user to spend time and efforts.
In the techniques to detect an inefficient page layout, there is a highly precise and user friendly technique to support saving of blank sheets of paper by using detailed settings of colors and the ratio of blank sheets of paper (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2006-164151, for example).
In another known technique to prevent waste of paper, if image data is determined to be equivalent to a blank document, the image of the document is not visibly outputted (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 9-284490, for example).
Moreover, in still another known technique, an image processing apparatus is provided with a blank space region detector. The image processing apparatus is configured to select a blank space region based on the result of blank space detection and insert selected print data into the selected blank space region, thus improving the efficiency and convenience in editing documents (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2004-102393, for example).
Furthermore, in still another known technique, a printer driver divides the document previously laid out into pages according to the page layout previously set and lays out the divided pages according to the printer driver's layout, thus easily achieving an output having layout intended by a user (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2009-145979, for example).
However, the techniques of the aforementioned patent documents are configured to detect a blank space in print data. Accordingly, these techniques have low precision in detecting blank space and therefore cannot prevent waste of paper.
For example, it is assumed that document data is created by a document creation application (for example, MS-Word (registered trademark), MS-Excel (registered trademark), and the like) in a personal computer (PC). FIG. 22 shows an example of the document data created by the document creation application. The horizontal lines shown in FIG. 22 represent drawing object data (text data or image data) in the document. In this case, most of the third page is a blank space (which is a large blank space page). The document data is subjected to image processing (watermarking, N-up processing, and zoom-in and -out processing, for example.) into print data. For example, if the document data of FIG. 22 is subjected to image processing for watermarks, the print data shown in FIG. 23 is created (the watermarks correspond to WTMs in FIG. 23.).
The aforementioned techniques of the patent documents are techniques for detecting blank space in print data as shown in FIG. 23. For example, if the aforementioned techniques are used to detect blank space in the print data shown in FIG. 23, there is no large blank space detected in any one of the three pages. Accordingly, the print data of the three pages is sent from the PC to the image forming apparatus, in which the print data is then printed on three pages of paper.
In short, the techniques for detecting blank space in print data cannot detect large blank space existing in document data. This results in a problem of low precision in detecting blank space. Moreover, these techniques cannot perform such a process that inserting the drawing object data of the third page of the document data into the second page. Consequently, the third page in which large blank space is generated at the time of creating the document data is also printed, thus leading to waste of paper.